The One Woman (Dixon, 1903)/Chapter 15
Again Gordon was seated in Overman's library and his single eye was asking some uncomfortable questions.
"I sent for you, Frank, because I discovered by accident, in the office of a newspaper of which I am a stockholder, that some curious things are going on between you and a young woman of your congregation. I put two and two together, and I've guessed the secret of your Temple. There's more behind all this than religious enthusiasm. That gift was not laid on God's altar, but on the altar of one of his little images here below. Out with it. You can't fool me."
"Well, your guess is correct. She gave the money. I love her and she loves me. Ruth will go South for the winter, and we have separated. A divorce will be obtained in due time, and I will marry Miss Ransom under the new forms of Social Freedom, and you will be my best man."
"Not on your life," Overman slowly growled, bringing his enormous jaws together and twisting the muscles of his mouth upward as though he smelled something.
"Can't stand the rustle of a woman's dress?"
"Oh, I might survive. You know they say the only really happy people at a wedding are the old bachelors."
"Then why not?"
"I draw the line at the progressive harem idea."
"And a bachelor?" Gordon sneered.
Overman nodded. "Many things may be forgiven sinners, but a bishop must be the husband of one wife."
"I'm not a bishop. I'm a man. I ask no quarter of my enemies."
"You have but one enemy. You can see him in the mirror any time."
"It's funny to hear you preach!"
The banker bent forward.
"Frank, you're joking. You don't mean to tell me that your Socialist poppy plant has borne its opium fruit so soon? That you are going to desert that charming little woman, shy, timid and tremulous, with her great soulful eyes, the bride of your youth, the mother of your babes, and take up with another woman, just as any ordinary cur has done now and then for the past four thousand years?"
Gordon winced.
"No. I am going to form a union with this beautiful woman which shall be a prophecy and a propaganda of the freedom of the race, when comrade life shall forget the ancient fears, each shall be free to find and love his own, love be loosed from tragedy, doubt or moan, each life be its own, original and masterful, each man a god, arrayed and beautiful!"
Overman laughed softly.
"So fine as that? You're great on the frills. You have dressed it up nicely. But when two of your man-gods, arrayed and beautiful, get their eyes, set on the same woman-god, still more beautiful, arrayed or unarrayed, you'll hear the rattle of the police wagon in the streets of Heaven, with the ambulance close behind."
The banker grinned and fixed his eye on his friend with a quizzical look.
"Don't be a monkey," Gordon scowled.
"Why not? You propose to go back to forest life."
"I propose to make human society a vast brotherhood," the preacher cried, with a wave of his arm.
"Well, don't forget that Cain killed his brother Abel for less than a woman's smile."
"Society is lost unless some great upheaval shall clear the rubbish and we build new foundations on truth and fellowship and freedom."
Overman put his hand on Gordon's knee.
"Frank, I'm a godless, crusty bachelor, but I read history. Destroy the integrity of the family and the salt of the earth is lost. The whole thing will rot."
"But I propose to purify and glorify the home its life by building it on love."
"Your dream's a fake and its world peopled with fools."
"Love must conquer all," the dreamer insisted.
"And to do it, Frank, it must begin at home. You are blinded by a woman's beauty."
"No; I love her with the one master passion of manhood. Such love is itself the highest expression of life."
"Confound you," snapped Overman, "love as many women as you please, but don't desert your wife and children. It's too vulgar. I'm ashamed of you."
"I will not live a lie," Gordon said, with emphasis.
"Strange madness. I urge you to tell a tiny little polite lie and save your wife and children. You're too good to lie, so you kill your wife, proclaim an insane crusade of lust, and call it a religion!"
"We can't control the beat of our hearts," was the dreamy reply.
"No, you can't; but you can control the stroke of your big, blue-veined fist! You have struck the mother of your children with your brute claws. It's a mean, low thing to do, call it by as many high names as you please. Love as many women as you like, but for decency's sake—can't you honour your wife with a polite lie?"
"It's not in me to lie, or to love but one woman."
The banker's massive shoulders went up and his bushy brows lifted.
"You'll end with a dozen. And it's such a stupid old story. You think the performance an original drama in which you are playing a star rôle. It's as old as the brute beneath the skin of your big hairy hand. Alexander could conquer the world, but he died in drunken revelry with a worthless woman. Caesar and Mark Antony forgot the Roman Empire for the smile of Cleopatra. Frederick the Great became a puppet in the hands of a ballet dancer. She spoke and he obeyed. Conde, in the meridian of his splendid manhood, the pride and glory of France, sacrificed his family, his fortune and his friends for an adventuress, who murdered him. Charles Stewart Parnell, the uncrowned king of Ireland, forgot his people and stumbled into death and oblivion over the form of a woman. The hills and valleys of the centuries are white with the bones of these fools."
"There was never a case just like mine."
"So every fool thought."
"But you have not seen this woman. You do not know her," Gordon protested, hotly.
"No; and I don't want to know her. 'Goest thou to see a woman? Take thy whip!' Women, savages and children are inferior and immature forms of evolution. But they are going to prove more than a match for you, my boy."
"Yes; I've heard you talk such rubbish before," Gordon replied, dreamily. "Mark, I'm sorry for the poverty of your life. The man who has not loved is not a man. He is a monstrosity out of touch or sympathy with the race. You cannot understand me when I tell you that our love is so pure, so wonderful, so perfect, it is its own defense."
"Indeed! Which love? For Ruth or Kate? Frank, I marvel at the childlike simplicity of your folly and your mental antics to justify it. It's enough to make that cat laugh that broke up your sermon."
"We are going to bear in our union and life the flaming standard of a revolution that will yet redeem society."
"I admire your ingenuity. Just a plain rooster-fighting sinner like me would never have thought of making his sin a holy religion. You haven't studied theology for nothing. I'll bet you could argue the devil or the Archangel Michael to a standstill on any proposition you'd set your heart on."
The preacher smiled.
"I never saw my course with greater clearness."
"Yes; but a nail in the pilot-house will draw the needle and drive the mightiest ocean greyhound on the rocks with the captain at the wheel dead sure of his course."
"Mark, it's utterly useless to talk. You and I are miles apart at our starting-point and we get farther with every step. You look at it from the vulgar point of view of the world. What I am doing is a great act of the soul, a breaking of bonds and chains. You see only the body. I am going to lead a crusade that shall so purify and exalt the body that it shall become one with the soul. The freedom of man can only be attained in unfettered fellowship, and this beautiful woman will be with me a comrade priestess to teach the world this sublime truth."
"And will you be the only priest with her in the Temple of Humanity?" asked the banker, quizzically.
Gordon laughed with insolent assurance.
"In her eyes, yes."
"But other men have eyes."
"Their gaze will not disturb the serenity of our love, because it will be built on oneness of ideal, hope, faith, taste and work."
"And yet dark hair loves the blond, and blue eyes hunger for the brown. It's an old trick Nature has played before, Frank."
"Well, we are going to show you a miracle, and you are coming with us by and by and be a deacon in this Church of the Son of Man."
Overman drew his straight bushy brow down over his one eye until it looked like the gleam of a lighthouse through the woods, turned his head sideways, peered at his friend and growled:
"Well, you are a fool!"
"I have faith that will remove mountains."
"You'll need it. I've been waiting for a church in New York broad enough to invite the devil to join. I'll come when it's ready."
"Good. We'll give you a welcome."
Overman grunted, and gazed into the fire with his single eye, frowning and twisting the muscles of his mouth into a sneer.